We present a data-driven method for the early detection of thermoacoustic instabilities. Recurrence quantification analysis is used to calculate characteristic combustion features from short-length time series of dynamic pressure sensor data. Features like recurrence rate are used to train support vector machines to detect the onset of instability a few hundred milliseconds in advance. The performance of the proposed method is investigated on experimental data from a representative LOX/H 2 research thrust chamber. In most cases, the method is able to timely predict two types of thermoacoustic instabilities on test data not used for training. The results are compared with state-of-the-art early warning indicators.